Anna Franceschini. VIR Fellowship 2011

‘At night, in the deserted streets, those little groups of men huddling in the glow of the welding torches, their voices ringing then dying immediately, have a secret look, as of people preparing things that the inhabitants of the day must never know about’.
Italo Calvino

It’s about Light and Death
Sometimes there are people who are prepared to give up
the exercise of their own perceptual faculties
in favour of visionary experiences.
To do this they withdraw from the fabric of everyday existence in order to bring about a hypnotic amplification of the phenomena of reality. They may end up inventing the phenakistoscope or measuring the size of soap bubbles, or finding, in the night, ‘a basis of sound, softer than silence’.
The disorder of the mind that results from this could be likened to the detachment of the retina following a prolonged
exposure of the eye to sunlight.
A necessary condition for the attainment of this state may be the willingness to isolate, even to extract, the fluid abstraction inherent in things, in order to
imagine a formal coexistence on more than
one level of the tangible.
An implicit potentiality to freeze and move images that in part escape us; a mechanism that is accomplice of the existent and the resistant transfigures the common use of the real to become animation, hologram, explosive 3D,
to the point of participating in a concrete, illusory
and luminescent Star Wars in Maciachini.
After the last image available, others will arrive,
regenerated by an eye that does not seem to bear the marks of use.
Gianluca Concialdi and Nicoletta De Rosa